Only 5% of the world’s population lives in the entire blue region. For comparison, the same number of people live in the small red region.

Believe it or not, it’s true. There are just as many people living in the small red area as there are living in all the blue areas combined.

This is a modified version of a map from reddit user Ibisdigitalmedia. When I first came across the original map, via the awesome Twitter feed of @NinjaEconomics, I was skeptical, so I went through and checked the numbers.

The original map turned out not to be entirely correct (the red region covered only about 3% of the world population), so I made this one from scratch based on the same concept.

Notice that the blue region covers more than just uninhabited deserts and tundras. It encompasses several prominent, powerful countries, including Australia, Ireland, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.

Can you identify the two countries within the red region?

The table below shows the full list of territories covered by each region, along with their 2014 populations.

I'm an NYC-based entrepreneur (my newest project: Blueshift) and adjunct instructor at UPenn. I'm fascinated by data visualization and the ways that data is transforming our understanding of the world. I spend a lot of time with my face buried in Excel, and when I find something interesting I write about it here and also as a Guardian Cities and Huffington Post contributor.More about my background

If you still think equal area is better, would love to hear your thoughts.

Commenter

What KURI-TAN says, but interesting regardless!

Ruth Thorpe

Would it hurt to wear a love glove, fucking Bangladeshis?

Arvind

Hello Ruth, please educate the Bangladeshis about the benefits of condoms, women’s education and population control first. Then pass judgement on their present state.

evaddict

This map doesn’t actually show much useful information. It isn’t making any worthwhile comparison. Vast segments of the blue area are mostly uninhabited for a reason – Siberia, the Canadian tundra, the rain forest, glacial ice, and desert which are mostly uninhabitable, or should not be inhabited for environmental reasons. The selection is somewhat arbitrary – where is Antarctica if we’re looking at low population densities? Basically, what is the point being made? What do we learn from this except for the fact that some places have very few people and others have a large number? Is there an implied connection with the relative wealth of the areas? Is there a suggestion that we as a species should do something differently?

Anon

It gives visual perspective, which is great for some learning types, or use as supporting material for more specific data, for presentations, etc. It is ale eye opening to the vast sums of people who are uneducated, or to children.

It reminds us of some of the following facts, but not limited to:
-How big the world is
-how dense we can pack human population if needed (This is very relevant to some of Australia’s approaching environmental problems).
-The fact that the geographic distribution of human population is skewed.
-An opening image to discussion on how environments and geography effect human settlement
-Perhaps if you went through the numbers, the sample size might be big enough to find a correlation between some more data on cultural differences and this data on population distribution. Maybe certain cultural norms more heavily influence density than geographic or environments /shrug.

I could keep going for ages. Just because data doesn’t have a specific purpose doesn’t make it useless or any less interesting. It’s only a bad thing if it is used misleadingly towards a particular end. IN this case, its just “hey check this out, it’s kind of cool and think of all the questions it poses for further research.” Of course, there are swathes of research on this out there already, but some people find it fun to do their own.

http://gravatar.com/perfectatdat perfectatdat

I belong to that red part of the world in India. But honestly I don’t find it crowded or may be I have gotten used to it or maybe since I have never been to the blue regions I don’t know how it will be like to have less people around.

http://metrocosm.com/author/mgalka/ Max Galka

I suppose it depends on which part you live in. As a whole, the red area has about 1,000 people per square km, which is not very dense compared to a typical city (NYC has about 10,000 per sq km).

On the other hand, Dhaka, the densest part, has 50,000 people per sq km.

Sure. 90% of people in the world are in the white area. The blue and red regions are only for the very extremes. The Netherlands is dense, but not within the top 5%.

Also, to build the map I did not just look at countries. I also looked at specific regions / provinces within the countries. So, even though India as a whole is less dense than the Netherlands, the three Indian states within the red region are far denser.

Rifat Bin Reza

I reside in Bangladesh. I would like to know where did you find the exact population of our country. As far as i know, from our governmental source that we have about 160 million people.

how cool
– how about a map of all women who vote on the more handsome candidate and never stopped wars as they promised when they fought for women’s suffrage
– a map of all women who reward psychotic powerful men with sex
– a map of all idiotic women who don’t understand that they can only be as much of a woman as much men think they are one. (Just as much something is as sweet as people taste it sweet or something could be only as lethal as easily people die because of it. Logically there is no other possible definition of women as it is related to men. Apart from that they can only be like a “generic human” or a standard mold of a genderless human.)
– a map of all areas where it is not needed to take even basic biology course to get into gender “studies”

Philippe

Seeing this just scares me so much knowing that in Bangladesh 20% of the land lies under 1m high and 60% under 5m. Added to this the Bay of Bengal funnels typhoons and waves up that way. And 5% of the worlds population lives in this area. I fear a disaster that would make the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami pale in comparison is all too likely. I just hope we will have implemented an effective series of solution the day when and not if this occurs.

http://metrocosm.com/author/mgalka/ Max Galka

You’re right. I used to build hurricane models, this area is at risk of a massive disaster.

Here’s another on population density, comparing 20 areas of very high density with 20 areas of very low.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Interesting one. Where is this from?

Charles Berger

That’s a handcrafted, artisanal exemplar of cartography you’re lookin’ at, good sir. To wit: I did it myself.

Data is painstakingly compiled from… um, Wikipedia mostly, but I did a lot of delving into 3rd order administrative subdivisions. Wiki is fine for some countries (eg US counties, Chinese prefectures) but not for most. Districts of India is useful…

Using 3rd order administrative subdivisions rather than the more commonly used 1st or 2nd really allows one to draw out the areas of maximum and minimum density.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Nice work.

This one only goes to 2nd order subdivisions. 3rd is just too much of a pain to work with. For this one of Japan, I must have spent three hours finding the 3rd order population data.

Some day I’ll make my way to Landscan data, 1km x 1km resolution population counts.

Charles Berger

Love the Tokyo map! But wait a minute, aren’t you exaggerating by shoving US cities proper into a Japanese full metropolitan area?

I feel your pain on using 3d order divisions. For me, this is a strictly a hobby, so I don’t mind getting lost in the minutiae, it’s like a treasure hunt. Going to do some inequality maps next, talk about a data minefield.